Reclaiming Our Ancestors II: UB conference to focus on racial justice and public history

Campus News

UB conference to focus on racial justice and public history

Reclaiming Our Ancestors II will include a showing of the re-enactment of the documentary "Gina's Journey: The Search for William Grimes," based on Regina Mason’s extraordinary odyssey to reclaim the pioneering narrative of her ancestor, the author of "Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave," published in New York in 1825.

By BERT GAMBINI

“Each ancestor that we recognize, claim and study shifts our understanding of where we came from, where we are and where we are going.”

Kari Winter, Professor

Department of Transnational Studies

A distinguished group of scholars, filmmakers and artists will
join many descendants of authors of slave narratives at UB for
three days of community events, conversations and workshops on
racial justice and public history being held Oct. 19-21 at various
locations on UB’s campuses and throughout Buffalo.

“Reclaiming Our Ancestors II,” organized by Kari
Winter, professor of transnational studies, comes two years after
she convened an unprecedented gathering of the descendants of
authors of slave narratives for a series of discussions,
reflections and writing exercises.

The first iteration of Reclaiming Our Ancestors explored
participants’ ancestral roots, bringing them back through
time to re-establish the rich historical cadence of events and
stories that reconnected family members to relatives whose passions
and collective vision produced the largest body of literature ever
written by enslaved people.

For this year’s event, Winter, who also serves as
executive director of UB’s Humanities Institute, has shifted
the program’s attention from an intensely personal experience
involving only the descendants of these illustrious authors to a
broader community event that will incorporate many voices,
including Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who will convey welcoming
remarks to conference guests and attendees at 9 a.m. Oct. 20 in the
Greenhouse Room of Buffalo’s Lafayette Hotel, 391 Washington
St.

Winter says this year’s Reclaiming Our Ancestors II will
foster partnerships across various lines, bringing together
scholars and non-scholars; the past and the present; and local and
national interests and concerns.

A complete schedule of events and list of presenters is available
online. Aside from an evening of jazz on Saturday, the
conference is free and open to the public. Space is limited,
though, and registration
is required.

“The idea is to explore examples and models of creating
public history and transforming spaces,” says Winter.
“We’re not assuming there’s a single model that
works equally well everywhere. Instead, we’ll look around the
country at initiatives and achievements related to racial justice
and public history, and then focus on what could be implemented
locally and what’s happening locally that can serve as a
model for other cities.”

Winter says Buffalo is already a point of national interest with
grassroots efforts and coalition-building symbolized by
organizations like PUSH Buffalo and its work to create sustainable
and affordable housing, and the city’s Partnership for the
Public Good, which is building relationships committed to the
common good in Buffalo.

“There are also many different gardening and urban
agricultural groups working with UB faculty,” says Winter.
“It might seem unexpected that urban agriculture is connected
to racial justice, but food is a central issue for people and where
they come from — it’s also one of the areas in which we
can most immediately appreciate the value of diversity.”

In fact, the luncheon on Friday will include a discussion of
food as a source of cultural memory, with presentations by three
participants — Susi Ryan, Sharon Leslie Morgan and Nadia
Shahram — who have published cookbooks in addition to their
other work in the fields of history and racial justice.

Reclaiming Our Ancestors II will probe possibilities couched
within the individual words of its title, each with implications
that, for Winter, stretch across the program’s overarching
goals.

Since the 1970s, “reclaiming” has been a central
strategy of feminist and civil rights scholars to discover what has
been lost, overcome silences and call attention to what has been
neglected or disappeared.

Though the conference focuses first on African-American history,
the pronoun “our” pushes participants to consider the
politics of who is included and who is excluded, and to move toward
understanding that all life is interconnected.

“Ancestors,” explains Winter, is a concept that
invokes intellectual and cultural genealogies, as well as
biological lineage. Ancestry helps explain humanity by honoring the
reality and limitations of our predecessors.

“Each ancestor that we recognize, claim and study shifts
our understanding of where we came from, where we are and where we
are going,” she says. “Although the vast majority of
the past remains unknown, the truths of our lives are vastly
enriched when we understand and appreciate a wider array of
particular stories and gain awareness of more aspects of the whole
fabric of the past.

“That’s why it’s so important that our
imaginations and landscapes and cityscapes be populated by a rich
and appropriately diverse array of acknowledgement of where we come
from.”

Like the first groundbreaking event, Reclaiming Our Ancestors II
is sponsored by UB’s Institute for Research and Education on
Women and Gender and the university’s Humanities Institute.
It is also co-sponsored by a major programming grant from
UB’s Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy.

The first event captured the attention of national media, such
as The New York Times and NPR.

The intensity of 2015’s workshop created a bond among
participants that matured into a nation network. It was an
inspiring success, and duplicating, or surpassing, that
achievement, says Winter, is an imperative more important today
than it was two years ago.

“What’s so interesting and unfortunate is that all
the issues we talked about at the first workshop have become so
much more important two years later,” she says. “The
resurgence of white supremacy and the battle over Confederate
statues are two issues that demonstrate that what we worked on then
is today all the more incredibly urgent.”

With her current interest exploring the connections among past,
present and future, Winter says the presence of descendants of
authors of slave narratives, again at this year’s event,
brings those temporal perspectives into full, unified view.

“We see where this comes together when we meet someone
like Lynne Jackson, a descendent of Dred and Harriet Scott, who is
working to both preserve the achievements and importance of their
struggle for freedom in light of the atrocity of the
country’s worst Supreme Court decision [Dred
Scott v. Sandford] and the worst imaginable legal statement
of racism in American history, when the court said a black man,
free or enslaved, had no rights that the white man was bound to
respect,” she says.

“Lynne worked successfully to have a statue of Dred and
Harriet Scott installed in front of the courthouse in St. Louis
[where Dred Scott initially sued for his freedom in 1846] and she
has organized dialogues about slavery and race with descendants of
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who issued that horrific
statement.”

Winter says her hope is that Reclaiming Our Ancestors II will
move African-American history toward occupying a more central stage
in our imaginations and in our cityscapes.

“We have an opportunity with this gathering to open
channels between the past and the present that are important in
every community,” she says. “Having these conversations
can help us move toward the future in a healthier and more just
way.”

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